New Potatoes!

Tonight's dinner comes to us from the garden.  Even the chicken is coated with a Panko crust that includes parsley, rosemary and thyme from the herb pots on the deck.

But potatoes - I just couldn't wait any longer.  The Sieglinde potatoes have had flowers for a little while now and I noticed that some of them are starting to drop - well, almost ready to drop, anyway!  I pulled up one of the plants and was quite frankly expecting pretty small babies.  To my surprise I harvested 9 potatoes from the one plant, each between 3 and 4 inches long and nearly a pound and a half in total weight.

One of the potatoes may be the seed potato as it's a little darker than the rest, but it's still in amazingly good shape when I would expect it to be a bit wizened and mushy.  The potatoes look very healthy - no marks or scabs at all. I've been keeping the potato beds well watered so I'm sure there won't be any cavities in the middle either.

So that most of the dinner comes from the garden, I picked a bunch of swiss chard and we'll have a salad with the ranch dressing from May's blog post - "First Homegrown Salad of 2014".  We like this dressing so much that we now always have a container of buttermilk in the fridge!

With the potatoes being such a success, I'm now eyeing the rhubarb bed for the future.  The rhubarb is just not doing well at all.  This bed is in the shelter of a massive Douglas fir tree and tends to be very dry even though I always seem to be watering it.  Rhubarb needs lots of moisture so perhaps this is not the best place for it.  Maybe we'll find another spot for the rhubarb (this will be the 4th move) and plant potatoes here.  Potatoes will still need water, but perhaps not as much as rhubarb.  Given what we now know about how scary non-organic potatoes can be, we'd sure like to produce more of our own.